Cybersecurity – High-Assurance Systems

Cybersecurity has become more and more important in our modern life where data is stored and transmitted electronically. The research group Cybersecurity - High-Assurance Systems, led by Prof. Dr. Chitchanok Chuengsatiansup, investigates mechanisms to safeguard our digital information with the focus on cryptographic engineering, side-channel analysis, implementation optimization, and post-quantum cryptography.

Research Areas

Cryptographic Engineering
Cryptographic schemes usually consist of several parameters which are interrelated by mathematical equations or properties. Knowing some parameters, or even parts of some parameters, could potentially reveal other, or parts of other, parameters. This raises a concern whether cryptanalyzing partial information could lead to recovering the underlying secret. Furthermore, translating mathematical constructions of cryptographic algorithms into implementations usually requires relaxations of certain conditions due to limitations on what real-world hardware devices can achieve. The result of such action could lead to a deviation of some properties, which could be security-critical. This research topic investigates how to handle such discrepancy between the ideal construction and real instantiation.
Side-Channel Analysis
History has shown that cryptosystems can be broken via side-channel attacks that exploit the interactions of the cryptographic software with the environment to derive secret information. Such attacks can effectively circumvent the strong mathematical constructions of cryptosystems and are deemed a serious threat. The focus of this topic ranges from uncovering and mitigating such powerful attacks, which is of prime importance to secure our sensitive information in this digital era.
Implementation Optimization
Optimizing implementations is usually not straightforward since there are various components that need to be considered simultaneously. Specifically, this multi-objective optimization needs to, among other things, manage registers and memory usage, select and dispatch instructions to different execution ports, and align independent instructions suiting vector units. This research topic analyzes how to best utilize available CPU resources and translate algorithm specifications into actual implementations.
Post-Quantum Cryptography
Currently employed cryptography is not secure against quantum computers. This means that once quantum computers arrive, our digital society will become insecure. With the advance of technology, quantum computers will be realized sooner or later. Therefore, to ensure the security and privacy of digital information, we need to start preparing quantum-resistant cryptographic algorithms now. This research topic investigates post-quantum cryptography, i.e., cryptographic algorithms that run on classical computers but are believed to be secure against quantum computes, to ensure the security of cryptography still holds even in the presence of quantum computers.